All Rise...

Editor's Note

The Charge

Opening Statement

When the star's name is misspelled in the opening credits, you know you're in
for a long evening.

Facts of the Case

In days of old, when knights were bold…a Central European ruler named
Daninsky (Paul Naschy, or "Nashy" as the title card bills him)
executes a coven of witches. For his trouble, he's cursed with a peculiar form
of lycanthropy that appears to transform its sufferers into German
shepherds.

Centuries later, a group of latter-day witches conjure up a black-garbed,
stocking-masked figure I presume is Satan—though he may actually be Rex
Smith as Daredevil in The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, I can't be sure.
The Prince of Darkness proceeds to engage in the time-honored tradition of
carnal knowledge with each of the nubile sorceresses. (Why, I wonder, does the
devil have a zipper down the back of his suit? And why the stocking mask? Is he
preparing for a post-coital spree of convenience store robberies?)

A wizened old crone who's been observing the Satanic orgy (but, thankfully
for the audience, has declined to participate) sends one of the girls to the
castle of Daninsky descendant Waldemar (Naschy again), who promptly decides that
he'd like to "get to know her better," again in that time-honored
manner. While Waldemar sleeps, his seductress carves a pentagram into his chest
with the jaw of a wolf's skull (John Wayne Bobbitt, upon viewing this sequence,
was quoted as saying, "Hey, buddy, it could have been worse") and
flees.

Things deteriorate for Waldemar from this point. He's tortured by nightmares
depicting gruesome murders. There's a lunatic with an axe running loose on his
castle grounds. A maggot-eaten corpse is discovered in his barn. He turns into a
werewolf. He gets busy with several comely women. (Okay, so it doesn't
deteriorate completely. But I'm at a loss to explain how a guy who looks like
Bluto from National Lampoon's Animal House after a visit to Steve
McGarrett's hairstylist scores so incredibly with the chicks.)

You can guess how it all turns out. How does every werewolf movie you've
ever seen turn out?

The Evidence

Bad movies exist for a number of reasons. Some stinkers can be chalked up to
the fatuous egos of the people involved, who think they can hurl fermenting
compost on the screen and the public will eat it up (witness Ishtar, Leonard, Part 6, Hudson Hawk). Other
movies stink because filmmakers succumb to the whims of greedy, tasteless studio
executives and survey-driven marketing wizards (witness the nauseating and
inexhaustible Police Academy and Friday The 13th sequels).
Then there are those movies that reek to high heaven simply because the people
who made them lacked the resources (i.e., talent) to make movies that
didn't stink, despite their earnest desire to create High Art. In this
latter category we find the films of such cinematic legends as Arch Hall, Sr.,
Edward D. Wood, Jr., and Paul Naschy.

Until Curse of the Devil landed in my review pile, Paul Naschy and
his oeuvre had faded into distant memory, a vestigial recollection from
my salad days poring through Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of
Filmland and its competitors back in the day. In the decades since, I
meandered blithely through life, blissfully unaware that an entire cult of film
fanaticism had sprung up around Mr. Naschy and his ultra-cheap, horrendously
awful monster flicks. But I now observe that there are dozens of websites
scattered across the Internet devoted to Naschy's dubious contributions to
cinema. To borrow a line from H.L. Mencken, I guess no one ever lost money
underestimating the taste of postpubescent fanboys hungry for nudity and
gore.

That Naschy got to make as many bad movies as he did (more than four dozen,
if the Internet Movie Database can be trusted) is testimony to the fact that
somebody out there really does love this stuff. Especially popular were Naschy's
portrayals of the tormented lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky, Europe's answer to
Lawrence Talbot, Lon Chaney, Jr.'s famous character from The Wolf Man and its progeny. Waldemar
actually has quite a bit in common with his American predecessor: neither Naschy
nor Chaney Jr. could act (Chaney Jr. coasted through his lengthy career largely
on the good name of his talented father); both Naschy and Chaney Jr. were
presented as romantic leads despite their homely visages and fire-hydrant
physiques; both were saddled with werewolf makeup that wouldn't fool Gene
Hackman's blind man in Young
Frankenstein (Naschy in Curse of the Devil looks for all the world
like Wile E. Coyote after a mishap with an exploding Acme delivery). In the
interview that accompanies the movie, Naschy notes that he wrote his first
Waldemar script for Chaney Jr., but the actor had become too ill to play the
role. So Naschy decided to take on the challenge himself, and the rest is
history.

Despite all of the foregoing, Curse of the Devil is one of the better
known and better made (if that's the way to put it) pictures in the Waldemar
series. That's not to say it's good. It isn't. It's laughably wretched.
Worse—it's boring. After a molasses-slow opening sequence, the pace picks
up to roughly the speed of glacial ice navigating the Arctic. We see far too
little of the wolf man, although when one considers the comical cosmetic
misfortune Naschy's sporting, that may be a good thing after all. Unclad
starlets parade through the film, often for no apparent reason other than
director Carlos Aured felt a few nude girls would distract the audience enough
that they would fail to notice the plot is incomprehensible. (No, that's not
quite accurate—the plot is non-existent. Tracing a narrative thread
through Naschy's self-penned script would be harder than finding vegans at your
local Stuart Anderson's Black Angus.)

To their credit, Anchor Bay has bent over backward to turn this sow's ear
into a ditty bag on DVD. (A silk purse would have been out of the question.) The
anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) is relatively clean for an aging low-budget foreign
flick. That scarcely makes up for the blanched color spectrum, inaccurate flesh
tones and occasional graininess, but it helps. The mono soundtrack sounds
predictably canned and trebly, but the dubbed dialogue (there's no audio option
for the original Spanish) presents clearly and the score, such as it is, is more
or less unobtrusive.

The primary extra on the disc is actually worth a look: a 15-minute
interview with Naschy himself, in Spanish with English subtitles. The man born
Jacinto Molina ("not a very interesting name") reminisces about his
athletic career (he was Spain's lightweight powerlifting champion in 1958) and
his big break into show business (as an extra in Nicholas Ray's 1961 Biblical
epic King of Kings). He reveals the
origin of his now-famous stage name ("Paul" came from a photo of Pope
Paul VI, "Naschy" from a Hungarian weightlifter he admired) and of his
best-known character, Waldemar Daninsky (Naschy made the character Polish
because the Spanish censors would only permit him to portray violence and
sexuality onscreen if the characters were not from Spain). It's evident from
this conversation that Naschy remains passionate about and fiercely proud of his
movies (maybe a mite too proud, given their quality).

A detailed text biography and filmography of Naschy are included, along with
an impressive gallery of poster art (several dozen slides' worth) from Naschy's
pictures. The theatrical trailer for Curse of the Devil rounds out the
disc. (Curiously, it never shows the werewolf, except for one hairy paw.)

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Where did Naschy's crew buy the fake blood they used in this flick—at
the far end of the "red" aisle at the Sherwin-Williams store?

Closing Statement

I know there are legions of dyed-in-the-wool Naschy lovers out there who will
carpe discum this howler off the video store shelves in less time than it
takes to say "Jacinto Molina." Don't you be among them. If you get a
hankering for some werewolf action by the light of the next full moon, stick
with An American Werewolf in London
instead. At least the laughs in that one come from stuff that was
intended to be funny.

The Verdict

The Judge wants to take this disc out and bust a sterling silver cap in its
shiny round hide. Paul Naschy is sentenced to time served and 100 hours of
community service helping Forry Ackerman clean out his attic. Court stands in
recess.